FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF
First Published in 1919
FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF
By
HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONDON:
PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES OF COUNTRY LIFE,
20 TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.2 AND BY
GEORGE NEWNES, LTD., 8-11 SOUTHAMPTON STREET,
STRAND W.C.2. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PREFACE
(Written in 1914)
I agreed to the suggestion that I should writethese reminiscences, mainly because it seems tome that circumstances have thrown my life along suchlines that I really have been more than any otherman at the centre of the growth of golf—a growthout of nothingness in England, and of relative littlenessin Scotland, fifty years ago, to its present conditionof a fact of real national importance. I sawall the beginnings, at Westward Ho! of the new lifeof English golf. I followed its movement at Hoylakeand later at Sandwich. I was on the Committeeinitiating the Amateur Championship, the InternationalMatch, the Rules of Golf Committee andso on. I have been Captain in succession of theRoyal North Devon, Royal Liverpool, Royal St.George's and Royal and Ancient Clubs, as well asmany others, and in these offices have been not onlyable but even obliged to follow closely every step inthe popular advancement of the game. I do notmention these honours vaingloriously, but only byway of showing that no one else perhaps has hadquite the same opportunities.
Possibly I should explain, too, the apparent magniloquenceof the phrase describing golf as a "factof real national importance." I do not think it is an[Pg 6]over-statement. I use it irrespective of the intrinsicmerits of the game, as such. When we consider theamount of healthy exercise that it gives to all agesand sexes, the amount of money annually expendedon it, the area of land (in many places otherwisevalueless) that is devoted to it, the accession in houseand land values for which it is responsible, the milesof railway and motor travel of which it is the reason,the extent of house building of which it has beenthe cause, and the amount of employment which itaffords—when these and other incidental featuresare totalled up, it will be found, I think, that thereis no extravagance at all in speaking of the golf ofthe present day as an item of national importance.At least, if golf be not so, it is difficult to know whatis.
It is because I have in my head the material for thetelling of the history of this rise of golf to its presentstatus that I have ventured to write these personalreminiscences, and underlying them all has been thesense that I was telling the story of the coming ofgolf, as well as narrating tales of the great matchesand the humorous incidents that I have seen a